


to fight the hardest battle

by petrichor (findingkairos)



Series: gentle beating of mighty wings [3]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemons, characters will be tagged as they show up, daemon!AU - Freeform, you don't need to read seiryu in order to understand this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 04:05:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14180202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/petrichor
Summary: In which having your soul manifest outside of your physical body can make for some great conversations and terrible challenges.Or, the His Dark Materials/Katekyo Hitman Reborn fusion ofSeiryū, but previous knowledge of the fic isn't required.“To be nobody but yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”— Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings





	to fight the hardest battle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [periphvna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/periphvna/gifts).



Chie chooses her name before she settles, which isn't unusual, Tsuna knows. He isn’t worried about it. He _isn’t_ , he swears. If anything he’s the unusual one - other kids in his grade all know what they want their dæmons to be, but whenever they turn to him and ask, Tsuna shakes his head and keeps quiet.

Then again, all of them have both of their parents, so what would they know? 

_Nothing_ , Chie hisses to him, first as a swift and then as something with sharper claws and then as something big and white that he doesn’t have a name for yet. _They know nothing. They shouldn’t_ -

Tsuna hushes her, running careful fingers through her feathers, putting them back into order from where she’s ruffled them. Birds are her favored form, nowadays, and he can see the appeal in it - being able to soar so high that he thinks that she can touch the sky, with the view that must be _amazing_ and the freedom to toss herself into it whenever she wants to.

Except. Except all of his classmates prefer dogs and cats and other furred things, and Tsuna understands that, and on some level he wants that, too. Birds always fly away, in the end, leaving everyone else behind.

But he is Chie and Chie is him and he’s never been able to keep a thought from her. She runs her beak through his hair, startling him into stillness, and his fingers are still in her feathers but she doesn’t seem to care when she flutters up onto his shoulder and her form melts into something furred and long. An otter, he remembers; he and Chie had looked it up, once, when they’d had a field day at school full of water and she’d reached for a form, unknowing, to match the rest of their classmates running headfirst into it.

“I won’t leave you,” she says, “I _won’t_ ,” and Tsuna presses his face into her fur.

* * *

Dæmons tend to keep close to their humans, which is part of the reason why no one blinks an eye when there’s a cat lounging on someone’s shoulders in class or there’s a dog stretched out next to someone’s desk, but that doesn’t mean people don’t stare.

And Tsuna loves Chie, he really does, only-

“ _Why not a sparrow?_ ” he hisses at her when the teacher is turned around, writing something on the board. “ _Why not a swallow, or a lark, or-_ ”

“ _And have me not be myself?_ ” Chie whispers back imperiously, and returns to preening her sparrowhawk’s feathers. She’s ignoring the stares from the rest of the class - not from the humans, _they’re_ all good students who aren’t struggling in class and know better than to do so. But Kikkawa-kun’s chicken is staring at Chie as if she’s about to eat her, and there’s a mouse in someone’s hood who’s strictly only a mouse for the hiding factor, and this isn’t the first time that she’s done this-

Chie snaps her beak at him when the teacher turns to make the rounds throughout the class, and Tsuna blinks her attention back to her. “Pay attention,” she mutters. “And you’re doing the maths all wrong, you’re missing a four from the ones column.”

Tsuna looks down. Chie is right. He doesn’t tell her so, though, because that’s only _encouraging_ his dæmon’s behavior, and she doesn’t need any.

People avoid them at lunch, and Chie is heavy on his shoulder. She is his soul, though, she knows this without him needing to tell her, and she tugs gently on his hair and Tsuna pats her carefully on her cuckoo’s head.

* * *

He’d thought that he could live the rest of his life like this, arguing with Chie and having her be winged until she’d found a form that she’d liked and Settled, which deserves the Capital S, _really_ kaa-san. He’d thought that she could choose her own forms and he could allow her this space.

But there’s kaa-san, and there’s tou-san, and the both of them have cats. Not that Kaede-san says anything really mean to Chie - she’d mutter about it, and be _insufferable_ about it, if he did - but.

Tsuna is familiar with the weight that comes with the sadness-that’s-not-quite-sadness, especially when his kaa-san directs it first towards the empty chair at the dinner table and then at him. He doesn’t need her to _say_ it in order to know it.

So whenever they’re in the house, Chie keeps to predatory birds, hawks and falcons and owls and eagles, some that Tsuna knows right away and some that he needs to look up. Kaa-san never says anything about it but Kaede-san blinks in satisfaction at the big ones, the scary ones.

But it’s not Chie who insists on looking up the one that makes the dæmon-cat still, like he’s the one caught in someone’s stare. It’s Tsuna that pulls down the book, and it’s Chie that indulges him in staying in the form long enough for him to identify it, and it’s the both of them that pore over the page.

“Eastern imperial eagle,” Tsuna reads carefully, shaping the hiragana in his mouth like he’s reciting in front of the class. He doesn’t dare look at Chie. “It’s one of the biggest, and it’s going extinct, and-”

“And it’s all well and good,” Chie interrupts, shuffling her feathers back into shape, as much of a hodgepodge of something winged and something clawed as she is right now, “but he knows - _they_ know - that you can’t force a dæmon.”

Tsuna bites his lip. Chie looks down at him from above her beak, and - the worst part - her eyes are not unkind. 

He swallows, once, twice. “I know. I know. But-”

“You don’t need to explain it to me,” Chie says. She’s still staring at him. “I know.”

Tsuna swallows again, and nods. “You know.”

* * *

But just Tsuna knowing isn't good enough. Just Chie knowing isn’t good enough.

When tou-san comes back, Tsuna stays in the house just enough to be polite before he escapes with Chie, her taking to the air as soon as they’re out the door. He follows after her, like he always does, like he always will.

They don’t make it too far from the house - there are a lot of black cars surrounding their neighborhood, and men in fancy dress and sunglasses, and the sight of them makes both Tsuna and Chie turn back from the playground they’d usually visit. Instead they find the tree near their house, the one that’s large enough to climb, and Chie darts up it on swift wings.

“That’s cheating!” Tsuna doesn’t yell, usually, but it’s a near thing. She just snickers at him, though, and people aren’t staring at him - the fancily dressed men must have scared them all away, and for the life of him Tsuna can’t be sure if that’s good or bad.

Chie calls down, “It’s not cheating if you’re using what you have!” And that’s a dare, Tsuna knows. A dare from his own dæmon isn’t a good enough reason to climb trees, usually. But there are unknown men in his house, and tou-san and his Akane-san, and his mother is smiling but there’s something in the air that makes Tsuna want to hide in his room with Chie tucked into his shirt while she’s in the smallest form she can stand.

So he climbs, scrambling up like he’s seen the kids at school do, like he’s done when he needs to get away from everything and everyone else for a little bit.

Except that what branches can take a swallow’s weight and what branches can take a child’s are radically different. Tsuna loves Chie, he does, he doesn’t blame her for his fall or the entire fuss with tou-san and Akane-san and tou-san’s friend who insists that Tsuna call him Grandfather.

He doesn’t blame her for Akane-san picking her up to present her to Grandfather’s dæmon, for not being able to run or fly to his side when Grandfather presses a finger to his forehead and does _something_ -

(Afterwards, Chie will turn into the warmest animal they know and curl around him, the fiercest, most protective animal, and try to apologize. _I’m sorry_ , she will say. _I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

Tsuna will try not to grab onto her fur too hard, and hide his face in her pelt.)

* * *

Chie prefers her birds, and she prefers her smaller predator birds at that - _Small and nimble and agile_ , she’d explained once, and Tsuna understands her in the way that he understands that the sky is more impossibly blue than anything he’s ever seen in his life - but. After that.

After Grandfather’s visit and the start of Tsuna’s clumsiness and stuttering, after Grandfather’s lynx had kept Chie from flying and had pulled enough of her feathers that she’d needed to skulk around as a grounded animal until she could fly again, Chie is equally as prone to taking a four-legged predator as she is a larger predator bird.

Tsuna doesn’t mind, most of the time; it’s hard for people to laugh at him when his dæmon is right there at his side as a protective wolf, or to jeer at him when Chie will glare right back as a tiger.

( _There are no tigers in Japan_ , Tsuna will whisper to her once, and she will turn that glare at him and ask, _Why does that matter?_

Why, indeed.)  

But it means that other dæmons can grab onto her. It means that other _people_ can grab onto her, because it might be taboo to touch a dæmon who’s not your own but he’s just Dame-Tsuna. Clumsy, useless, why-is-he-here Dame-Tsuna. Who knows if he’s even real or not? Who knows if he’s _human_ , when his dæmon flickers between forms so fast she’s just a blur, when she takes on animals that people have only seen on television and in the zoo. Maybe he’s cursed. Maybe the gods have turned their faces away from him.

Who knows?

 _Let’s find out_ , the cruelest of them say, and in those moments Tsuna is painfully glad that he is able to throw Chie and watch her sail off into the sky, far from harm.

* * *

So it’s Dame-Tsuna and his Odd Dæmon that makes it through Primary, one hesitating day at a time, while kaa-san smiles her smile and Kaede-san keeps _staring_ , the both of them disappointed. Tsuna tries not to think too much about that, while Chie talks with Kaede-san, then argues, then pointedly ignores him.

Outside of school, Tsuna picks himself up when he trips or when he’s pushed to the ground, and sometimes Chie is able to help. Sometimes she needs to stay up on a telephone pole, watching and hating the fact that she can only watch, while the bullies say _You should just go away_ to Tsuna and their dæmons try to snatch Chie out of the sky. Sometimes she’s in the thick of it with him, taking on a fox’s teeth or a bear’s bulk or, a memorable once, a giant salamander’s incandescent rage.

But they are a human-dæmon pair, the two of them, and Chie is too stubborn to be separated from Tsuna for long. He’d be angry about that, if he weren’t grateful, if he still didn’t pull her to him each night and sort out her fur or feathers or the rare set of scales, the preening movement calming them both.

It’s just the two of them in Namimori, after all - Sawada Tsuna and Chie, living in a house with a single mother and a father.

So when a stranger steps between them and a crowd of kids from Namimori, a wooden sword slung at her hip and a snake hanging off her shoulders, Chie shifts into a dog to grab his sleeve and _pull_. It sends him tumbling, almost as bad as any fall he’s ever taken when his limbs won’t work the way he needs them to, and he’s busy blinking away the stars in his vision to push Chie off of his chest or listen to whatever’s going on.

But when Tsuna peels himself off of the ground, the bullies are gone. The stranger is sheathing her practice sword, and the snake has twisted into some sort of hawk, perched on her shoulder. Chie clicks her tongue and does the same, fluffing out her favored falcon’s feathers on top of his head.

He doesn’t wince - Chie’s talons are a familiar pain, after how many times she’s made a nest out of his hair before - but he does bow as best he can. “T-thank y-you, stranger-s-san,” he makes out, and then closes his eyes. 

Maybe if he hadn’t said anything, he wouldn’t have stuttered. Because the bullies can be explained away, but the _stuttering_ can’t, and as soon as he walks two steps he’s going to trip again, Chie on his head or not.

Tsuna doesn’t open his eyes, afraid of what he’ll see, and lets the silence stretch on. It’s Chie that goes, “Are… are you alright?” in a question vague enough to be for either human or dæmon, and _that_ hesitance, when usually she’s unafraid to make her intended conversation partner clear, makes Tsuna look.

A black-haired blue-eyed stranger looks back, and she’s pale. “Does this happen often?” she asks instead of answering, but there’s something distant in her voice.

Her dæmon swats a wing at the back of her head, and she immediately scowls - it’s intimidating, but still way better than the look she’d had before. Tsuna startles into a laugh, before he immediately bites it down. Chie has no such qualms, chirring in the bird-version of a cackle.

“What the he- heck, Tamotsu,” the stranger sputters, and then twists, trying to stare down the hawk on her shoulder. Tsuna doesn’t need Chie whispering in his ear to tell him that she’d been about to say a _bad word_. “What was that for?”

“Ignore my human,” the bird says instead, and the first thing that registers in Tsuna’s brain is that he sounds kind. “She’s alright, as am I. How about you?”

“We’re fine, thank you,” Chie replies, and pulls lightly on Tsuna’s hair when he opens his mouth. “Thank you for the rescue, by the way. We’re sorry to bother you.”

His dæmon - his better half, if his mother and Kaede-san and his classmates and everyone else are right, and honestly most days Tsuna’s inclined to agree with them - is trying to sound polite, which Tsuna is grateful for. Everything is still hazy, his depth perception just the slightest bit off, and his dame-state isn’t something that’s just restricted to the classroom.

But then the stranger blinks, and sighs, and smiles. It’s a really nice smile, Tsuna thinks, even as he’s returning it by habit if nothing else. “It’s not a bother at all,” she says, as if Chie had been speaking to her and not to her dæmon. It’s enough of an oddness that makes him startle, though Chie does her own version of it on top of his head. “Though I’m thirsty, and Tamotsu would probably like something to drink, too. Would you like to come with us?”

If the stranger notices her bending of societal norms or Tsuna and Chie’s reactions, she doesn’t show it. Her dæmon doesn’t seem to think it’s anything out of the ordinary, either, instead sliding off of his human’s shoulder to hit the ground as a leopard cat. He walks away, leaving Tsuna and Chie to stare after his slowly swishing tail, then at his human.

“They helped. They didn’t have to do that,” Chie murmurs, and hops from head to shoulder. The movement pulls Tsuna out of his head long enough to straighten, and then bob his head. He doesn’t say anything, and after a moment he panics about that, tries to draw up reasonable words to say-

The stranger nods back, and this time her smile has an edge of what Tsuna thinks is relief to it. “I’m Yamamoto Keiko. What’s your name?”

“S-sawad-da Ts-tsunayoshi,” he says, and breathes through Chie’s claws tightening on his shoulder, just light enough for it to be pressure, not pain.  “よろしくお願いします。”

“よろしく。” Yamamoto-san murmurs back, and turns to lead the way.

**Author's Note:**

> I love dæmons. They're fascinating, both as a part of the _His Dark Materials_ series, as well as a literary device. That being said, Bea is a terrible enabler and I love her.
> 
> Chie is spelled with the kanji 智慧. Tamotsu is spelled with the kanji 保.
> 
> Hover over the Japanese for pronunciation!
> 
> How do Dying Will Flames work in a dæmon-fusion world? They're powered by someone's will to live, but the actual mechanics are a little more complicated. I've outlined some of how Flames work in _Seiryū_ 's universe in [The Newbie's Guide to Flames, Revised Edition*](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13474584), so feel free to leave speculation and predictions in the comments!


End file.
